Tag: social media

Let’s begin by specifying what we’re talking about – we need a definition! What exactly is social media? Everyone knows what social media is, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to define! You know it when you see it, right? Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat – that kind of thing? But what about Wikipedia? Or WhatsApp? Are they social media too? If not, why not?

In addition to this definition of social media, we should also consider the core features that we find in every service.

Core features:

Profiles: every social media service has a place that you can call your own little corner of the internet, where you can choose a username, add some information about yourself, upload a photograph and that kind of thing

Connections: there has to be a feature where you can connect with other people, whether adding friends or family, or following other accounts or being followed by them

Updates: whether tweets, status updates or blog posts, there also has to be a feature where you can write something in plain text

Media: whether photographs, videos, livestream or audio, all social media services have some way for users to upload and share some form of media. In the past, it was possible to distinguish social media from social networking services because they

Messaging: even though social media is very much about publicity and visibility, every social media service also has a feature where you can talk secretly, usually called private messaging or direct messaging

Values: finally, everywhere you go on social media, there are numbers everywhere. Total followers, numbers of friends, how many people liked your photo – there are numbers everywhere. These numbers are important for how we as users navigate social media, but also important for how social media understands us.

This rules out Wikipedia because, despite being very much a place where anyone can participate, it really doesn’t have the same emphasis on personal experiences – it’s much more about general knowledge. Similarly, while WhatsApp has some of these elements too, it is too much of private experience to fall into this definition. And while you might think that YouTube doesn’t have any status updates – that feature is there if you go and look for it!

To learn more about the psychology of social media, check out the links below.

This book is about the psychology of social media. It’s about trying to explain how so much of our everyday lives and modern culture came to be saturated with these incredibly popular and absorbing services. Chapter 1 opens with these questions… How do we express …

What are the values of social media? The last chapter of The Psychology of Social Media begins by repeating the book’s psychological definition of social media. In other words, the idea that these online services encourage us to digitise previously private personal information. Fundamentally, Chapter …